Which of the following is true?
(a) Balderdash is a German word for expressing disbelief about the kids these days.
(b) Balderdash is a competitive sport played in the winter, in which competitors run (or “dash”) around poles and large stones.
(c) Balderdash is a board game whose participants propose plausible definitions for obscure words and score points for fooling the other players.
(d) Balderdash, collectively, are invented and/or Latin words used on playing pieces to save money when printing the international editions of a board game.
Like most family games, the components of Balderdash are simple — in this case, a box of cards, a board that amounts to an 18-point scoring track, a handful of pawns, a die, and a pad of paper. Frankly, the die isn’t necessary.
The cards are the central thing: Each one presents five unfamiliar words and a short, plain-English definition for each. One player, who becomes the “dasher,” draws a card and uses the die to choose one of the words. On a roll of six, he chooses freely among the five. The dasher reads the word aloud but keeps its defi- nition secret. The other players invent what they hope are plausible definitions for the word, write them down, and pass them to the dasher.
Once he or she has all players’ invented definitions in hand, the dasher reads each, as well as the actual definition, in a random order. He takes care to conceal both who submitted which definition and which definition is correct.
Finally, each player chooses a definition as correct. A player advances his or her pawn two spaces for guessing correctly, and one space for each other player who chooses his or her fake definition. The dasher advances three spaces if none of the others choose the correct definition. Any player whose “invented” definition matches the real definition also moves three spaces.
The role of dasher rotates, and, as one says of playing the venerable but point- less card game war in a casino, “That’s it.”
Words on their own merits having become a bit unsexy in these modern times, versions of Balderdash published since the canonical 1984 purple-box edition gussy up the premise with additional categories of things to be defined. Beyond Balderdash has people, movie titles, dates, and acronyms in addition to plain old words, and the current edition — back to just Balderdash again — substitutes “laws you’ve never heard of” for Beyond Balderdash’s dates. On one hand, one supposes all that’s fine; on the other hand, one bemoans the death of popular interest in just plain words.
As with many games that have iron roots in the popular culture, the gameplay concept behind Balderdash was hardly invented with its publication. Its ancestor, a parlor game most frequently called Dictionary or The Dictionary Game, is prob- ably more than a century old. In that version, a regular dictionary is used rather than prepared cards. Players take turns in the leader’s role and simply select the word they prefer, either at their discretion or from a random page. Score is kept, in prehistoric fashion, on paper.
But let’s be clear: Balderdash — unlike, say, Monopoly — isn’t popular simply because the premise is as old as rust. Balderdash’s popularity stems from being a good game, and fun.
Good means that the game’s rules work well, and reward the correct behavior in the right proportion, so that the struggle to win makes sense from wherever one happens to be standing at any given time. The players are rewarded appropriately for both submitting plausible definitions and making good guesses. The dasher is rewarded for contributing the critical element of impartiality in presenting the other players’ definitions.
Fun means what you think: That playing the thing’s enjoyable. In the case of Balderdash, much of the fun arises because playing the game is funny. If comedy arises from discrepancy — and, as John Hodgman might say, “IT IS SO” — Balderdash has high discrepancy in spades. It comes from the chasm between the absolute literary authority of the dictionary and the absolute non-authority of families playing board games on Thanksgiving. It comes from the gap between the inherent meaninglessness of arbitrary syllables and the meaning that we ascribe to them as the human constructs known as “words.” There’s also the fact that a game about the definitions of words has the deliberate point of obscuring their mean- ings. And last but not least there’s the way that Balderdash exposes the serious business of communicating with language as being fraught with an inexhaustible supply of words that actually inhibit communication by their very obtuseness.
Good and fun are fine and dandy, but for my money, the reason Balderdash belongs in a book enumerating the very best family games ever designed boils down to a single word: creativity.
Creativity, I say, is the most powerful human force, barring nothing except perhaps free will. (And what’s at the bottom of creativity itself, if not free will?)
The problem with creativity is that too many people assume they don’t have it and can’t do it. When families talk seriously, mom the administrator and dad the accountant too often remove “creativity” to the strange and foreign landscape inhabited by the unfathomable individuals of legend — your Bob Dylans, your Maya Angelous, your William Shakespeares — which is certainly not the land- scape populated by their kids, if they know what’s good for them and want to make a decent living when they grow up.
But that’s crap. As a growing mountain of literature and expanding popular knowledge tell us, creativity is a discipline, a habit, and a skill like most others. Creativity is something anyone can do. It’s not easy, but neither is it alien or remote.
The magic of Balderdash is that it provides a framework that makes it easier to be creative. Rather than having to invent something from the entire universe of things that one could create, the task is more modest: Invent a definition for a word. And here’s the word. But don’t just invent any old definition; even that sub-universe might be daunting. Just invent a definition that a reasonable person might believe is correct.
With those constraints, it hardly even seems like creativity, which is why it’s so clever. Balderdash’s training wheels are so well concealed that its players don’t even realize they’re riding a bike.
At the end of the day, Balderdash is a gateway to creativity, the most precious human gift. What could be better?
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